Originally Posted by
sammyindc
I wish they would let this apply for large convention.
While Marriott may or may not be allowing hotels to "play games" with this benefit, unfortunately, there isn't much they can do for situations like large conventions/events. If a group/convention has a block on the whole hotel (which for large conventions/events isn't unusual) there isn't much Marriott can do. They would be opening themselves up for legal issues if they forced a hotel to give up some contractually obligated rooms.
You might think that maybe Marriott could force hotels to not contract out their whole inventory (i.e. hold back 10% or something.) But that would asking quite a bit from hotel owners. I suspect that convention hotels could potentially lose out on a lot of revenue that way. So I doubt that will happen either.
Personally, in terms of a "room guarantee" my experience has been that Marriott's is the best of all the major hotels. While it may not be perfect, I've had better luck find a room at "sold out" hotels with my Marriott Plat room guarantee than I did when I was a Diamond at Hilton or Plat with SPG. Note that I am NOT talking about award room availability. Marriott does limit those. The SPG "last base room" available is much, much better than Marriott's "we won't black out the date, but we also don't force hotels to offer anywhere close to 100% of base room availability for awards either and we allow hotels to greatly limit the number of award rooms for X number of nights each year" approach.
